Unless you’re a cleaning fanatic, everyone’s kitchen gets a little dirty. While it’s fine to leave your kitchen in less than immaculate condition, that mentality usually changes when the in-laws and other relatives come visiting for the holidays or major family milestones. Those individuals whose kitchens have become woefully dirtied, especially the oven needed for many a turkey or ham dinners, may even panic at the need to clean things up. Fortunately, a dedicated solution for any sort of stain or grime is relatively cheap and may already be in your cabinet or pantry.
To create the ultimate in grime-busting cleaners, simply mix 1/4 cup (roughly 59 mL) of baking soda into some water. Stir the concoction until such time that it becomes a paste. Smear your DIY cleaning paste over every part of your oven, or any other grimy place in your kitchen, paying extra attention to the door and viewing window.
Leave the paste to settle for a period of time between 15 minutes to half an hour; you will know the paste has done its job when it takes on an unpleasant brown coloring. If you’ve done this correctly, all you need to do now is simply wipe all the brown paste away with a wet rag. If you still notice any traces of unpleasant marks, a little muscle and a sponge should be sufficient to remove those last traces and will restore the state of your oven to something close to how it came when you bought it.
Beyond the aesthetic benefits of owning an oven free of caked-on debris, there are other, more important issues that a using dirty oven negatively contributes to. When you combine the sort of high temperatures common in using an oven with the long-forgotten remnants of grease, meat and crumbs from previous uses, you are following a recipe for a fire hazard; old grease still burns, or at least contributes to generating an unhealthy amount of smoke that can lead to breathing issues and ruin the taste of the food you’re currently cooking.
For just one example of how dangerous an unclean oven can be, 70% of all domestic fires in the United Kingdom were the result of cooking with a dirty oven. While it is a good idea to clean your oven at a frequency that matches with its use, you may wish to use this paste once every three to four months; this should help to keep tough messes and health risks to a minimum.